


Battle Armor

by rude_not_ginger



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-17
Updated: 2014-09-17
Packaged: 2018-02-17 19:33:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2320850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rude_not_ginger/pseuds/rude_not_ginger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Irene Adler dresses the part in Sherlock Holmes' clothing.</p><p>Her mindset as she wears his clothes throughout "A Scandal in Belgravia", and how she plays to win.  Winning for Irene Adler might very well mean losing in a very different way to Sherlock Holmes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Battle Armor

**Author's Note:**

> An experimental piece written for the SRPB Bonus Round: "Wearing each other's clothes". Unbeta'd.

His coat is heavy. She's nude in it, and she can feel the smooth interior lining against her back, her stomach. The roughness of the wool scrapes her wrists and reminds her vaguely of bondage.

Except it's not _her_ that's being tied down by this.

She's seen the photographs of her 'treat'. She knows what he likes---or very nearly. A clever man, a selfish man, a vain man. He holds this coat to the highest of standards. It's cleaned regularly, she can smell the expensive washing used. It's pressed, it's _adored_. It's the coat that makes the man.

And he's offered it to her. To cover her naked body with, so they can continue their investigation.

She wonders, just vaguely, if he'll wash it immediately after she returns it. If he'll be so irritated by the whole situation that he'll need to clean out the scent of her perfume, of the knowledge that the nude body he so adamantly refused to see was tucked inside.

If he would need to remind himself that she wasn't the shell encircling him.

She wasn't wrong about him. This was an _easy_ win. So easy. Just a reminder of who is in control. He _wanted_ to let go, he wanted her to win. He hadn't been defeated in so long, his ego didn't know what it was like to scrape himself back up, to revel in victory after defeat.

This was almost _too_ easy. If Jim hadn't told her that Sherlock Holmes was the step towards Mycroft Holmes, she'd have almost tossed the coat aside, given it back. Informed Sherlock Holmes that his clear attraction for her was _insulting_. She could do better. She had done better, and would again, long after her plan was complete.

But, for now, she wears his coat, permeates herself into it, and plays the game.

"I like detective stories, and detectives."

Irene Adler plays to win.

+~

She slides the silk over her body. It's his robe, his best dressing gown. She's seen it for sale, she knows how much it costs, and where he bought it. She likes to imagine it was bought casually, on a whim. A thoughtless purchase, simply because he didn't have a dressing gown.

No. The way the silk slides across her naked breasts, the luxuriousness of it, makes her think _no_ , that isn't this dressing gown at all. This was a gift, given by someone who wanted him to have something nice for all those days he lounged around, defiantly the opposite of _nice_.

The robe smells unwashed. It smells musty, like sleep and sweat and cigarettes. He handed it to her when she needed something to wear after her shower, and there was hesitation in the gesture. It's his best dressing gown, and he's unprepared for another human being to be in it. It smells and feels like complete submission.

She owns him, and this dressing gown proves it.

She steps out of the washroom, and John Watson is there. He looks at her in the silk robe, a dark-haired female version of the roommate he privately adores and worships, and his eyes go dark with desire. He flusters, and turns away. She doesn't own John Watson, not the way she owns Sherlock Holmes, but she could, if she wanted to.

There is nothing sexier than the power of knowing that she _could_.

"Who's after you?"

Irene Adler, after all, plays to win.

+~

She does what she does best. Sets up her proverbial dominos, plays the game the way she knows how. Gets Moriarty what he wanted, in exchange for a nudge in the direction of Mycroft Holmes.

And John Watson leaves. Leaves her with Sherlock Holmes. Leaves her, sitting across from him, still in his best dressing gown that smells like sweat and cigarettes and submission. 

He's staring at her, but he's not seeing her. She has never been the wilting flower, she has never played the coy and quiet. When she walks into a room, all eyes go to her. She has always been the center of attention. There is something…enrapturing in how completely he ignores her. He's sitting there, sitting in his chair, plucking strings on his violin and not speaking. Their soundtrack is the fireplace and the stray note he plucks on his violin. A nonsensical melody that follows the train of his mind.

It's oddly beautiful.

The room smells like the fireplace, now, but she can still smell that sweat, that sleepiness. He hasn't smoked in this robe in a long time. She wonders how long it's been. 

Would he be able to see how long it's been? A stray fleck of ash? Could he see the cigarette she smoked in university? The stray one here and there after an impressive night with a lover? If their places were reversed and he were in her robe, could he smell it and know exactly how long since it was washed, how many nightsweats she'd woken from, and how many cigarettes she'd smoked?

She stares at him, and she knows he could. It's a very silly thing to imagine, she thinks. Him, in that green night dress. But she imagines him inhaling the side of it, and drawing long and complicated conclusions. Listing lovers and trysts and nights up waxing her legs over the side of a hotel bathtub. He could see scraped knees and whips and long fingernails drawing blood in lines down her back.

Because he _could_. Sherlock Holmes could work out every last detail of her from just the scent of it. From just the feel of the fabric and the way it moves. There's something positively _sexual_ in the way his brain works. In the way his mind finds things, finds _everything_.

She has had sexual interactions with men before, of course. Even recently, she slept with the husband of a noted author (and the author herself) in order to destroy the marriage. Sex and attraction are two very different things. She is _attracted_ to women. To their cheekbones, their lips, the shape of their hipbones.

That _brain_ he has, though. She finds herself aroused thinking about what he can do with it. Stunned by how much it arouses her.

With Sherlock Holmes, the fact that a man is attached to that brain is only the mildest of inconveniences. But there isn't much time before her plan clicks into place, and she'll never know about this attraction, never know what it might've tasted like if she ever put it into action.

"Have you ever had anyone?"

Irene Adler is playing to win, but her battle armor isn't protecting her nearly as well as she thought it would.


End file.
